When Madeline Was Young by Jane Hamilton Read Free Book Online

shelter, and, let's not forget, at the top of your profession. I'm sure you can face your cousin, honey, and be of comfort to him. You were so close!"
    "Yeah, Dad," Lyddie said. "Get over yourself."
    They all laughed. Tessa had gone beyond hearing range and wa s n ot there to defend me. It is a chronic amusement, to be surrounded on your own grounds by no one but women, including the dog, Nancy, the Rhodesian ridgeback, and at one time a girl hamster named Sammy. The holding is twelve acres, much of it landscaped, with a six-thousand-square-foot post-and-beam house, moderately efficient, and a three-car garage. The kitchen, which Diana calls Contemporary Country, reflects her rural upbringing and also her modern tastes. There is a gingham wallpaper design, tile inserts of farmyard animals here and there on the countertops, dried flowers hanging from the always freshly polished copper pots, but amid that rustication--boo!an eight-burner Viking stove, a pantry with a thousand-bottle wine cellar, and a stainless-steel refrigerator the size of a tanker. Her cookbooks suggest that she has eaten at the restaurants of the great American chefs and that she believes in the slow-food movement. At the dinner hour there is no luckier man than I.
    At the time the house was built, it was Diana's dream come true, along with the grape arbor, the apple orchard, and the bower of lilacs. Her latest wish to perfect that dream is a lap pool in a solarium. I have brought on the accounts and shown her our debt load, and I've reminded her how many times the house has already been in the Annual Hospital Tour of Homes, the doctors showing off their goods but of course for charity. Diana reads optimistic fiction in which, as far as I can tell, the heroine discovers her inner strength and lives out her life feeding off that rich core. In the end, both she and I know, she will get her way.
    Nothing for the lone male to do but retreat into the paterfamilias silence, far away and yet close enough to hear, when they are home, the rushing murmur of the girls' endless chatter and internecine squabbles. To contain my love for them, I have a room far from the hub--"the cell," they call it--where I have amassed my books. It is there that I close my door and take up the histories of the ancient world, from 1999 backward.
    IN CHILDHOOD, when a matter of a few months separated the men from the youths, Buddy was nearly two years my senior; I was the second oldest, and there were four boy cousins under me. There was, in addition, a much younger bunch we paid no attention to. The five of us, the elders, could not count ourselves in the same stratum as the master, and we gladly submitted to Buddy's command. It was we, I later thought, who trained him to be an officer, serving courageously in Vietnam, the recipient of ribbons and medals, including a Silver Star. After his initial tour as a guard, he re-enlisted, the second time with the First Logistical Command, working the supply lines from Da Nang. Through the years he made his way up the echelons, a career military man, until, as Tessa suggested, he was some kind of chieftain--a sergeant first class, last I'd heard.
    How well he'd turned out, and against all the early predictions. In his school days he was no scholar, much to his mother's mortification. There was naturally talk in the family about the fluke, the genetic near impossibility, that Harvard and Radcliffe graduates, Figgy and Bill Eastman, had produced a boy who not only had average intelligence but was almost held back in the third grade. Had he been dropped on his head as an infant, or deprived of oxygen for a minute at birth? The relatives seemed not to consider that he didn't care enough about his studies to apply himself, that he had no academic interests, that he filled in the circles at random on standardized tests. There was fresh incredulity and some glee among the aunts when they'd managed to learn that he'd scored in the 20th percentile on his